THETARPON 43 



" Imagine a herring-shaped fish, five or six feet 

 long, with brilliant silvery scales the size of half 

 a dollar, in schools of a dozen or twenty, leaping 

 from the blue surface of a summer sea. This is 

 all that the angler usually sees of the tarpon. 

 Sometimes one of these glittering, rushing mon- 

 sters takes the hook. What follows? The line 

 runs out with great speed till it has all left the 

 reel, when it parts at its weakest point, and the 

 fish goes off leaping seaward. When hooked on 

 a haiidline similar results follow. No man is 

 strong enough to hold a large tarpon unless he is 

 provided with a drag or buoy in the shape of an 

 empty keg attached to the line which may retard 

 or even stop the fish after a while. The tarpon is 

 sometimes taken with a harpoon or seines." 

 Just before anglers began to take these fish with a 



rod and reel that celebrated angler, Dr. James A. 



Henshall, the authority on black bass, thus described 



their capture : 



"The boat being poled quietly along the fringe 

 of mangrove bushes at the edge of the channels, 

 the man standing in the bow with the grains ready, 

 at length spies a great tarpum some six feet long, 

 like a giant fish of burnished silver, poised motion- 

 less in the shade. When within striking distance, 

 he hurls the grains by its long handle with a skill- 

 ful and dexterous thrust and unerring aim, born 

 of long experience, which strikes home with an 

 enormous thud, when the monster tears away with 

 a tremendous spurt, leaps clear of the surface, 



